"I can't tell you how many grandparents have come up to me emotional, thanking me for writing the book," he says. "They say that their daughters are going through relationships like this. One woman stopped me on the elevator and said she sent my book to Oprah."
Phillips claims the book is a warning to single mothers, whom he characterizes as being the most vulnerable members of our society outside of the extreme elderly. "They get run over. It's a free-fire zone on them," he says. "Extreme wealth, privilege and social standing may be no protection. Dinny was a hunter. Joan was the biggest game in town.
Phillips also claims to be the first person to have done something to stop Shah.
"Unfortunately, there's always an appetite for what would purport to be the secrets of the rich and famous. Sadly, the lawyer who defended the guy, who stood in the middle of the courtroom and proclaimed that those children were lying, then tried to profit on essentially the salaciousness of selling the secrets of the rich and famous to the community.
"That is kind of insulting. It's not kind of insulting, it's damned insulting." -- Jim Perdue, Jr.
Very recently, (and apparently very quietly), the Texas Department of Public Safety relaxed its standards for the instrument certification. The .02 agreement requirement is gone. The multiple breath test specimen requirment is gone. The requirment that the reference sample be maintained at a particular temperature? Gone.
The DPS actions immediately raise the question, why? Why were the above requirements considered so vital to instrument certification for years no longer necessary to ensure a valid and reliable breath sample? If this is supported by new scientific study that demonstrates the the requirement is not necessary to achieve consistent and valid breath test results, what are they? Why have they not been publicized? The technology behind the Intoxilzyer certainly has not changed. As a practical matter, this means that objective observers should have considerably less confidence in the validity and reliablility of the results of the Intoxilyzer 5000 when the standards for instrument certification are quietly stripped away.That's not exactly true. The regulations (which can be found in 37 Texas Administrative Code, Section 19.4) were last amended in 2006 (Click here for the "old" regulations). No one took out the requirement that the breath test operator note the temperature of the reference solution because that requirement never existed.
He deconstructed a meal and rebuilt it in a play of 32 acts. Each act told a story and brought forth a memory. He believed a meal should touch all of the senses - he told Tony that 70% of a plate is the scent. He was adamant that the pace and rhythm of a meal was of the utmost importance.
Hi Paul, We just posted an article, “10 Modern Criminals Who’ve Made a Killing”, I thought I'd drop a quick line and let you know in case you thought it was something your audience would be interested in reading. (http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/10-modern-criminals-whove-made-a-killing.html)When I typed in the URL at whois.net, this is what I got:
Thanks!Jay Smith
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Reason Code: IEIsna quoted Ms Bahrami as saying: "I struggled for seven years with this verdict to prove to people that the person who hurls acid should be punished through 'qisas', but today I pardoned him because it was my right.
"I did it for my country, since all other countries were looking to see what we would do."
Ms Bahrami was quoted on Iranian TV as saying: "I never wanted to have revenge on him. I just wanted the sentence to be issued for retribution. But I would not have carried it out. I had no intention of taking his eyes from him."
Sec. 4. (a) The commission shall: (1) develop and implement a reporting system through which accredited laboratories, facilities, or entities report professional negligence or misconduct; (2) require all laboratories, facilities, or entities that conduct forensic analyses to report professional negligence or misconduct to the commission; and (3) investigate, in a timely manner, any allegation of professional negligence or misconduct that would substantially affect the integrity of the results of a forensic analysis conducted by an accredited laboratory, facility, or entity. (b) An investigation under Subsection (a)(3): (1) must include the preparation of a written report that identifies and also describes the methods and procedures used to identify: (A) the alleged negligence or misconduct; (B) whether negligence or misconduct occurred; and (C) any corrective action required of the laboratory, facility, or entity; and (2) may include one or more: (A) retrospective reexaminations of other forensic analyses conducted by the laboratory, facility, or entity that may involve the same kind of negligence or misconduct; and (B) follow-up evaluations of the laboratory, facility, or entity to review: (i) the implementation of any corrective action required under Subdivision (1)(C); or (ii) the conclusion of any retrospective reexamination under Paragraph (A). (c) The commission by contract may delegate the duties described by Subsections (a)(1) and (3) to any person the commission determines to be qualified to assume those duties. (d) The commission may require that a laboratory, facility, or entity investigated under this section pay any costs incurred to ensure compliance with Subsection (b)(1). (e) The commission shall make all investigation reports completed under Subsection (b)(1) available to the public. A report completed under Subsection (b)(1), in a subsequent civil or criminal proceeding, is not prima facie evidence of the information or findings contained in the report.When the law was passed in 2005, the act was to apply to evidence tested or offered into evidence after September 1, 2005. The point, presumably, was to provide a safeguard against junk science being admitted into evidence after the effective date of the act by giving the Commission the power to regulate and investigate forensic facilities to ensure that proper scientific procedures were being followed.
Except as provided by Subsection (e), a forensic analysis of physical evidence under this article and expert testimony relating to the evidence are not admissible in a criminal action if, at the time of the analysis, the crime laboratory conducting the analysis was not accredited by the director under Section 411.0205, Government Code.Well, that's all well and good, Mr. AG, but we're not talking about whether any item of evidence is admissible. We're talking about reviewing an old case to determine whether an innocent man was executed as the result of junk science. Now I understand that Gov. Goodhair is worried that when the world realizes he sat on his hands while an innocent man was murdered by the State of Texas it might cause a bit of a problem for his presidential campaign -- but Gov. Perry's political aspirations are secondary to whether or not an innocent man was murdered.
[Amanda Culbertson] and others worked to train technicians to keep air conditioning units on to regulate the temperature of the breath machine that measures blood alcohol levels in suspected drunken drivers. She also said an electrical glitch that was never fixed meant the sophisticated measuring machines would reset every time the van's air conditioner was turned on.
She said she supported the idea of a mobile testing site, but that HPD did not work to maintain the accuracy of the test results.
"In theory it's a great idea, but it depends on who is in charge of the environmental conditions," Culbertson said.
Although we appreciate the court of appeals’ effort to vigilantly protect the constitutional rights of our citizens, we also conclude that the court of appeals misapplied the Fourth Amendment’s command that searches and seizures be reasonable. As we discuss in more detail below, we first conclude that Trooper Williams’s stop was justified at its inception. Next, we conclude that, in light of the factual circumstances that followed,Trooper Williams’s further detention of Mr. Morris was also a reasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.The court then twisted logic even further with this:
Under the Fourth Amendment, a police officer may stop a vehicle only if the officer has a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the driver or a passenger is engaged in criminal activity. Although to be lawful, reasonable suspicion must be based on “‘specific and articulable facts and rational inferences,’” “[a] police officer need not actually observe a violation” to make a stop. “Instead, ‘as long as an officer suspects that the driver is violating any one of the multitude of applicable traffic . . . regulations, the police officer may legally stop the vehicle.’” The fact that an officer mistakenly relies on objective facts that upon closer review suggest that the stop would not be justified will not automatically render the subsequent search unconstitutional. Indeed, “[a] factual belief that is mistaken, but held reasonably and in good faith, can provide reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop.”
Thompson said that's the problem: Expulsion and suspension policies focus too much on punishment, and not enough on addressing the misbehavior and having students learn from their mistakes.
"We think the findings in this report should prompt policymakers in Texas and everywhere else to ask this question: Is our state school discipline system getting the desired results?" Thompson said.
Whitmire complained of "large inner-city school districts creating a large bureaucracy to deal with oftentimes just dumb teenage behavior that can be corrected short of making it a crime."
Whitmire said the report confirms his concern over the continual growth in criminalizing classroom behavior.
"We all want safe schools, an orderly environment and for teachers to be left alone," said Whitmire, the senior member of the Texas Senate. "The nonsense begins with overusing the issuance of Class C misdemeanor tickets and the tremendous growth of school district police departments."
Sparrow says her movie trivia failure reminded her of a concept called transactive memory, proposed 30 years ago by her Ph.D. adviser Daniel Wegner. According to the theory, people divide the labor of remembering certain types of shared information. For example, a husband might rely on his wife to remember significant dates, while she relies on him to remember the names of distant friends and family—and this frees both from duplicating the memories in their own brains. Sparrow wondered if the Internet is filling this role for everyone, representing an enormous collective act of transactive memory.
To test this idea, Sparrow devised a series of offline experiments to catch people in the act of relying on future access to information—say, a Google search—rather than memorizing the information themselves. “I didn't want them to actually have access to the information but just think that they would,” she says. For the first set of experiments, which involved 106 Harvard undergraduates working on desktop computers, Sparrow tested whether people thought of the Internet as soon as they were posed true-false questions such as, “An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.” She employed a psychological method called a Stroop task. After the trivia questions were posed, various colored words would appear on the screen. When those words matched topics that people were already thinking about, they tended to react more slowly when asked to name the words' colors. And indeed, when the colored words were Internet-related, such as Google or Yahoo, the students answered more slowly, indicating that they were already considering going online for answers.
Then Sparrow played a trick on her subjects. She presented 40 different trivia statements to the students and had them type the factoids on the computer. She told half of the group in advance that the computer would save what they had written so they could see it later; she told the other half that the computer would erase it. Then all of the students were challenged to write down the statements from memory. Those who had been told that the computer would erase their notes had by far the best memory of the statements, as if their brains had made an emergency backup. Those who were expecting to retrieve the information later performed more poorly."Transactive memory" is the phenomenon that Dr. Daniel Wegner says he seems with long-term couples. According to his research, couples who have been together a long time tend to rely on each other to remember things. You can think these long-term couples as parallel computers. One partner might be best at remembering the day-to-day activities of life while the other partner is the "encyclopedia."
So the concept isn't new, but what does it mean?The study is “convincing,” and “there is no doubt that our strategies are shifting in learning,” says Roddy Roediger, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “Why remember something if I know I can look it up again? In some sense, with Google and other search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto machines.” But Roediger says this trend started long before the Internet. “When I was a student, many years ago, we consulted books and encyclopedias to write papers. Now students can do it at home on computers. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.”Said Dr. Sparrow:
"I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that we're remembering things... If you can find stuff online even while you're walking down the street these days, then the skill to have, the thing to remember, is where to go to find the information. It's just like it would be with people - the skill to have is to remember who to go see about [particular topics]."Might this be a reason to request that jurors be allowed to take notes during trial? If we are better able to process where to find the information rather than remember the information, would it be a benefit for jurors to write down their thoughts and observations during trial, rather than try to remember what they saw and heard afterward?
I believe that there are unanswered questions as to why the child died, and I still feel that this is a suspicious death of a young child. Given my review of all the material from the case file and having had more experience in the field of forensic pathology, I now feel that an opinion for a cause and manner of death of undetermined, undetermined is best for this case.Dr. Moore went on to state that since the date of the autopsy she had received additional training and believed that the bruises on the child's body could have been caused by aggressive CPR or other attempts to revive the child.
Here, similar to the criminalist's testimony that she could not positively identify the sample, cross-examination by the Applicant established that Moore's testimony was her professional opinion and that she was not ruling out other reasonable hypothesis by which Tristen died. In addition, like the criminalist's testimony, that asphyxia was the cause and homicide the manner of Tristen's death has not been entirely refuted. As the convicting court determined, "[n]o expert rules out asphyxia as the cause of death," "[n]o expert can exclude Applicant as the perpetrator if it is a homicide, and no expert has excluded homicide as the manner of death." During the habeas proceedings, various experts have opined that the autopsy findings do not adequately support Moore's conclusion that the death was a homicide by asphyxiation (and Moore herself has adopted that position, but none of the experts have stated that Tristen could not have been intentionally asphyxiated. And although they critique Moore's interpretation of the petechiae evidence upon which she relied at trial, the "non-specific" indicator cannot be ruled out as being the result of asphyxiation. On the other hand, at least one well-qualified pathologist, Dr. Norton, has concluded that the child was a victim of homicide by asphyxiation.In dissent, Judge Alcala (the newest member of the panel) argued that the majority was splitting hairs and denying Mr. Robbins the relief to which he was entitled. She wrote:
The record shows that, as the sole witness establishing cause and manner of death for the State at Robbins's trial, Dr. Moore testified that, based on her scientific opinion beyond a reasonable doubt, the cause of Tristen Rivet's death was asphyxia due to compression of the chest and abdomen, and the manner of death was homicide. In her evidence concerning this application for a writ of habeas corpus, she now concludes that the cause of death was, beyond a reasonable doubt, not compression asphyxia, and undeterminable as to homicide, asphyxial or otherwise. Dr. Moore's subsequent testimony is a complete refutation of her trial testimony because, although her trial testimony stated that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the cause of death was compression asphyxia and the manner of death was homicide, she now says that the cause and manner of death are, beyond a reasonable doubt, "undeterminable." Both positions cannot be true. This wholesale refutation of her previously professed scientific certainty nullifies the veracity of the conclusion itself...
Perhaps Dr. Moore's testimony could not be called "false" if, for example, she consistently determined, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the manner and cause of death could be established with scientific certainty and that the manner of death was homicide, but was uncertain whether the cause of death was asphyxia by some means other than compression. See Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 82 (1935) ("The true inquiry, therefore, is not whether there has been a variance in proof, but whether there has been such a variance as to 'affect the substantial rights' of the accused."). But Dr. Moore's changed testimony is not merely a variance in proof. Her present position acknowledges that the cause and manner of death could possibly be natural causes or homicide and that both are equally likely. An acknowledgment that trial testimony could possibly be correct because no one can determine the cause and manner of death with scientific certainty is vastly different from evidence that the cause and manner of death are proven beyond a reasonable doubt with scientific certainty. I, therefore, agree with the trial court's assessment that the record shows that Dr. Moore's testimony was false.Mr. Robbins should receive a new trial. While Dr. Moore didn't lie on the stand during Mr. Robbins' trial, she has re-evaluated her findings and she has come to a new conclusion. That new conclusion contradicts the testimony she gave at trial. Had the jury heard this new testimony, the question becomes was there a murder?